You’ve heard all the buzz and the excitement about virtualization. You’ve talked to companies that have done it and you’re completely impressed with the flexibility, cost savings, and uptime management. Problem is you still don’t have a clue how to start and don’t even know what’s involved.
To get you rolling, we spoke with Timothy Stephan, Senior Director, Product Marketing for VMware who gave a session at VMworld 2011 entitled, “Virtualization 101.” We asked him to walk a complete newbee through the steps of getting up and running with virtualization.
First step is go get a hypervisor, said Stephan, which is a thin layer that talks to the hardware, and enables a server to act like a number of servers, all independent from each other. When a hypervisor is installed on a physical host you can run a number of applications that act independently even though they’re running off a single server.
Next step is to expand on that concept of multiple applications on a single server by managing multiple virtual hosts on a single infrastructure. No need for independent physical hosts each running a single solution. Multiple virtualized hosts can act as a single pool of resources that the applications consume on an as needed basis, explained Stephan.
The necessary equipment
You probably won’t need any more equipment.
Advantages of virtualization
A virtual machine is a virtual server. The application and operating system are encapsulated in software. Since they’re not tied to any specific hardware server they can migrate on and off of physical systems with zero downtime.
There’s nothing you can’t do with a virtual machine that you can already do with a physical machine. In fact, Stephan argues, there’s a lot more you can do with a virtual machine.
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